Chaim Kupferberg
Yusufszai, incidentally, moonlighted (Cont'd)
Thu Jun 19 19:48:14 2003
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http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP206A.html
Yusufszai, incidentally, moonlighted as an ABC News producer, charged with guiding ABC News correspondent John Miller through the Afghani marshes to the bin Laden [bat]cave - one of the very few American journalists to be accorded such an honour (and also, as it happens, a good friend of bin Laden arch-foe John O'Neill. But not chummy enough to direct O'Neill on to bin Laden's hideaway). Moreover, Ismail and Yusufszai are mentioned together in a CNN article posted January 4, 1999 - the former for his Newsweek interview, the latter for his own bin Laden dialogue for TIME Magazine the day later.

Rahimullah Yusufszai, regarded by New York Times reporters John Burns and Steve LeVine as "one man who has seen more of the Taliban than any other outsider," is also named by The Nation, in its article of January 27, 1997, as "one of the favourite journalists of [Pakistan's] ISI...one of the organizations funding and arming the Taliban. "

It's a small world after all. In the September 29, 2001 article of PressPlus, Yusufszai's ABC colleague, John Miller, mused about running into his buddy John O'Neill in Yemen while reporting on the U.S.S. Cole bombing the year before. "He said, 'So this is the Elaine's of Yemen.' "

"There is a terrible irony to all this," Miller said. I'll say: Miller, one of the very few Americans who can give a first-hand account of bin Laden, bumps into his friend, bin Laden's chief investigator, while both are investigating a bombing in Yemen that will later be tagged onto bin Laden - and only a year before O'Neill dies at the hands of... allegedly ...bin Laden.

Now, following the logic of my hypothesis, if the bin Laden threat was, pre-9/11, a close-knit propaganda campaign, one would expect to find the same names showing up repeatedly in combination with one another. This, too, applies to the American commentators. Let us return to the August 1998 American bombings of bin Laden's tool sheds as an example. The night of the bombing, Rahimullah Yusufszai received a call from bin Laden aide Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a report from the Associated Press. Later, Yusufszai obtained for ABC News exclusive photos of the damage to bin Laden's camp. Further commentary describing the layout of the bin Laden camp was furnished to the Washington Post by former CIA analyst and terrorism expert Kenneth Katzman, as well as Harvey Kushner of Long Island University. Only little more than a week before that, Katzman and Kushner were offering their assessment of bin Laden's culpability for the embassy bombings in Africa in a Washington Post article penned by Vernon Loeb and Walter Pincus. They were joined in this effort by Vincent Cannistraro, the ABC news analyst who also escorted John Miller to his bin Laden interview, as well as provided running commentary in the days immediately following 9/11. Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, provided covert aid to the Afghani mujaheddin in the late '80's, as well as supervised CIA operations with the contras. He was also one of the point men in the notoriously circumspect investigation at Lockerbie. In the above-noted Loeb and Pincus article - in which bin Laden is quoted from the ABC News Miller and Yusufszai interview - Cannistraro weighs in with his assessment of the embassy bombings: "I believe Osama bin Laden is the sponsor of this operation, and I think all of the indications are pointing that way."

Soon after the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, a Vernon Loeb Post article, dated October 13, 2000, proceeded to implicate bin Laden through the detailed information provided by Kushner, Katzman, and Cannistraro. Earlier, in a Vernon Loeb Post article dated July 3, 2000, Yusufszai, Kushner, and Cannistraro unveiled bin Laden aides Ayman al-Zawahiri and Muhammed Atef as the men to watch as bin Laden's likely successors, with a helpful tidbit on the Zawahiri biography thrown in by the Saudi-owned al-Sharq al-Awsat.

None of the above, of course, is offered as the "smoking gun" pointing the way to a propaganda conspiracy, nor are my chosen examples meant to be exhaustive in evidencing this point. According to Felicity Barringer, in a New York Times article dated September 24, 2001: "A good deal of the public information on bin Laden comes from the journalists who went to Afghanistan to interview him, including [Peter] Bergen, ... Peter Arnett, John Miller, Rahimullah Yusufzai, and Jamal Ismail." The article further makes reference to Vernon Loeb, Al Quds al-Arabi (Atwan), Judith Miller, Al Jazeera, and Brian Jenkins (formerly of Kroll Associates - the security firm that obtained the WTC position for John O'Neill by way of Jerry Hauer). Clearly, I have also not heretofore made mention of the other experts who have worked assiduously toward building our knowledge base on bin Laden - Steven Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Yossef Bodansky, and various British and EU elites. However, the above examples do show how the information flow on bin Laden could be plausibly managed by the skilfully placed revelations of a relatively insular clique of "experts" called upon repeatedly by the mainstream media.

Here is how it would work: A relatively few well-connected correspondents provide the "scoops" that get the coverage in the relatively few mainstream news sources - the four TV networks, TIME, Newsweek, CNN - where the parameters of debate are set and the "official reality" is consecrated for the bottom feeders in the news chain. In other countries, this is what is known as propaganda - or, put less politely, psychological warfare.

But before I leave this topic, I would like to provide an example of "news management" that is revealing for what is omitted - that is, the "smoking gun" of Pakistani ISI involvement in the events of 9/11. On October 9, 2001, the Times of India dropped this little bombshell: "Top sources confirmed here on Tuesday that [ISI Chief Mahmud Ahmad] lost his job because of the "evidence" India produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the World Trade Centre. The US authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 were wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan by Ahmad Umar Sheikh at the instance of Gen. Mahmud."

What makes this particular piece so devastating is that only days before, much of the mainstream American media was touting the news of a "key link" in the chain of evidence linking bin Laden to the events of September 11 - namely, a $100,000 wire transfer to the hijackers from a shadowy operative linked to bin Laden. Yet once this operative was "outed" as being linked instead to the Pakistani ISI Chief, any propaganda gains initially made through this evidence would now crumble. One possible reason might stem from this Karachi News item, released only two days before September 11:

"[Pakistani] ISI Chief Lt-Gen Mahmood's week-long presence in Washington has triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council. Officially, State Department sources say he is on a routine visit in return to [sic] CIA Director George Tenet's earlier visit to Islamabad...What added interest to his visit is the history of such visits. Last time Ziauddin Butt, Mahmood's predecessor, was here during Nawaz Sharif's government the domestic politics turned topsy-turvy within days. That this is not the first visit by Mahmood in the last three months shows the urgency of the ongoing parleys..."

In other words, this was a propaganda piece that went disastrously wrong. After October 9, bin Laden's alleged paymaster could now be linked to a U.S. "ally" who spent the days before 9/11 in deep consultation at the Pentagon. The US authorities immediately went into damage control mode by insisting on the quiet retirement of the "outed" ISI chief. Thus removed from the public eye, the ISI Chief's role in all this could be effectively ignored, and an American media black-out could be safely assumed.

Such a scenario certainly fits in snugly with my hypothesis, which I will now proceed to elaborate completely. The events of September 11 were masterminded by those who were in the best position to manage the consequences - namely, those most able to manage the flow of information, those most able to coordinate all the elements necessary for the perpetration of a successful operation (subverting airport security, guiding the planes to their specific targets), and most significantly, those who stood to reasonably benefit in the aftermath. Conspiracies, by their very nature, are not crimes of passion. They may involve rational, albeit cold-blooded, attempts to achieve a desired end by employing the most effective means available. It is for this reason that "mainstream" terror groups like Hamas and Hizbullah largely avoid attacking American interests where such attacks would serve no practical interest. For all their talk of Jihad, these terror groups tend to plan their specific attacks with an eye to the consequences that could reasonably be expected to follow. Thus, knowing the moral and political constraints of Israeli deterrent strategies, they calibrate their attacks to elicit consequences that are most tolerable for them - and hence, manageable. Yet surely, in the light of the cult of suicidal martyrdom, such considerations no longer hold sway. Perhaps. But then, in the case of such a far-flung anti-Zionist movement as al-Qaida, one would expect at least a little more exertion against Israeli interests than has heretofore prevailed - unless, of course, the "point" of al-Qaida was to provide a plausible dire threat to American interests where none had then existed. In any case, as nobody has noticed this particular anomaly, there was no need for any needless exertion of resources in order to bolster a credibility that needed no bolstering in this one particular sector.

Motive, means, and opportunity. While I presented the Saudis and Pakistani intelligence as clear-cut proxies, the only motive these elements would have to benefit from a crime of this nature is an assurance that no punishment would be forthcoming but rather, they would be on the right side of power and wealth among those in a position to determine the booty.

Another anomaly: on the very day that the ISI Chief was in deep consultation at the Pentagon, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the head of the Afghani Northern Alliance - a cultishly popular figure within that group, and a mortal foe of Pakistan's ISI - was assassinated by two terrorists posing as cameramen. Keeping in mind the fact that, throughout the '90's, American leaders such as Clinton, and American companies such as Unocal, were largely throwing their support over to the Taliban in opposition to the Northern Alliance (or United Front), it seems rather convenient that, in the aftermath of 9/11, the way was now cleared for the Northern Alliance to be co-opted as an instrument for setting up a more pliant Afghani government (now headed, incidentally, by a former consultant to Unocal).

So who are the ultimate controllers? To begin with, the circumstantial evidence seems to point to an operative clique primarily based out of New York City and the State of Florida. I stress the word "operative", as this clique appears to consist of subservient agents involved in laying the preparations. Once again, John O'Neill serves as an effective Rosetta Stone in interpreting the raw outlines of this operative clique (which is by no means a "rogue" clique). The FBI and CIA elements involved in counterterrorism have a checkered past. For one, Oliver North in the 1980's served as Counterterrorism Chief while he used his office as a cover to deal with such narco-terrorists as Monzar al-Kassar (who figures in the crash at Lockerbie - also investigated by Cannistraro). In the late '90's, O'Neill was transferred from the federal office of Counterrorism to the New York Counterrorism Office of the FBI - and it was the New York branch which was then designated as the primary investigator of all overseas investigations involving bin Laden. Moreover, this branch was also involved in the somewhat suspect investigation of TWA 800 - investigated by O'Neill and reported upon by ABC's John Miller, who was formerly the Deputy Police Commissioner of Public Relations for the NYPD before he joined up with ABC.

As regards New York, there is another element involved in germ warfare operations. Actually, a multi-million dollar bunker - serving as a command and control center in the event of a biological attack - was set up at 7 World Trade Center at the direction of Rudolph Giuliani, who also oversaw the mass spraying of malathion over the boroughs of New York City when the West Nile Virus hit town a few summers previously. The man Giuliani placed in charge of that operation, Jerry Hauer, also happened to be the man who found John O'Neill the position at the World Trade Center, as well as being the one who - by his own admission - identified O'Neill's body.

Moreover, there has been a widespread campaign on to link the threat of al-Qaida with that of a mass biological attack. At least the day after September 11, the link - as the Anthrax mailings had yet to arise - was not so apparent. Yet on PBS' Frontline, the New York Times' Judith Miller (no apparent relation to John Miller, as far as I'm aware), accompanied by the New York Times' James Risen, was interviewed as an expert on al-Qaida. Several weeks later, Judith Miller would once more make the headlines as the apparent recipient of an anthrax mailing which turned out to be a false alarm - yet was all the same conveniently timed with the well-publicized launching of her book on...germ warfare. As was later discovered, the anthrax mailings petered out once the news leaked that a DNA test revealed the material to be of the Ames strain of anthrax, an agent synthesized out of a CIA laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Nevertheless, this was sufficient to fast-track Bioport's exclusive license for the anthrax vaccine toward FDA approval. Formerly, Bioport's experimental anthrax vaccine was being forcibly administered - under threat of court-martial - to hundreds of thousands of American servicemen (in conformity with Bioport's exclusive and lucrative contract with the Department of Defense).

Incidentally, Judith Miller, along with Jerry Hauer, was among 17 "key" participants in a biowarfare exercise known as "Dark Winter" - a think tank-funded scenario that aimed to study the nationwide effects of a hypothetical smallpox outbreak. One of the sponsors of that exercise was the Anser Institute of Homeland Security, an organization established before September 11, 2001. Interestingly enough, the curious phrase "homeland security" was starting to creep up with increasing frequency in the vocabularies of certain political cliques (Dick Cheney, the Hart-Rudman Commission, et al.) in the year or two leading up to 9/11.

The point of the above-noted information is to draw attention to an apparent propaganda campaign to prepare the public for a catastrophic biological attack. As with the Twin Towers, the blame for any coming attack may be duly and plausibly assigned by those who carefully laid the groundwork in preparing us for this eventuality.

As for Florida, the connection with this state is obvious, for not only was the first anthrax mailing directed to the Florida offices of the National Enquirer, but many of the accused hijackers were also reported to receive their pilot training from flight schools in Venice and Tampa. Notably, it was a Florida bank account to which hijacker Mohamed Atta allegedly deposited his 9/11 pay cheque. Moreover, Florida, by way of the MacDill Air Force Base, is also Central Command for the war in Afghanistan. In addition to its function as Central Command for the war on terrorism, MacDill is -outside of Langley - also a major base of the CIA. Thus, in the CIA's own backyard, we find the infrastructure and financial support that went into the planning for the events of 9/11. And, as we so often find with events surrounding 9/11, another synchr

• And, as we so often find with events surrounding 9/11 — Chaim Kupferberg, Thu Jun 19 19:51